Sunday, April 19, 2009
{ 8:39 AM }
Through the process of film-making, our group hopes to explore a couple of themes that are extremely pertinent in the society. A community can often be represented by a family. However, family problems are often a result of social ills in the community as a whole. In this film, we touched upon the themes of social class, intra-family communication, stark generation gaps as well as domestic conflicts. Classified under the umbrella of strained family relationships, we can see that all these themes that we have identified have strong links with the issue at hand. The film aims to act as a stereotype, showing a typical family relationship, between a father, a sole breadwinner; and a teenage son, still oblivious to the outside world, and hence failing to appreciate his father’s hardships.
The problem of social class has been looked into both in general, and specifically, into family ties. Many problems within a family are often a result of differences in social classes within a community. People begin to compare their social class, where the higher classed claim superiority through their ability to support their own material needs. Not only does this divide the community, it divides a family, especially when one compares his own parent’s social status to someone else’s, just like in the film ‘father and son’.
Communication between family members is also a good theme to look into, as this is often what we call a ‘catalyst’ to further conflicts. Due to a lack of efficient communication, misunderstandings often brew, resulting in further arguments to something that both parties are not clear about. Through this film, we hope to be able to analyze and see how important communication is, even if it was through letter writing, or even talking verbally.
We indentified a stark contrast in generation gaps, due to the change in mindset and concepts over the years. Due to generation gaps between the older and younger generations, this is indeed a cause of conflict between older and younger parties. With such generation gaps present, the film explores the ideas of how these contrasts can affect the relationship between a father and a son, and how this gap causes misunderstandings that lead to family conflicts, within the Singaporean context.
Labels: communication, father and son, generation gap, social class, themes
